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Old 08-14-2017, 09:09 AM
  # 29 (permalink)  
OpheliaKatz
"O you must wear your rue with difference".
 
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Join Date: Aug 2017
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Thank you for posting this. My AH was emotionally abusive towards me and blamed it all on PTSD. Before the relationship ended he became violent. The cops said that the drugs he was taking can cause violence. AH blamed his actions on PTSD because in his mind, the drugs make his life better, not worse. He calls me an "abuser" for abandoning him because he has PTSD. Rather than find a place to live, he decided to be homeless. He posted updates on social media saying that his abusive wife made him homeless. Apparently I was abusive because I wanted him to stop spending all his money on illicit drugs and because he wasn't having enough sex (well, he was high 99% of the time). I also wanted him to eat, sleep and clean his bathroom once in a while -- at least once a month -- and he said that I was treating him like a child. So I said, OK, I won't tell you to do anything, and that's when he stopped eating, sleeping... etc. It was all drugs all the time. If I tried to talk to him about these issues, I would get gas-lighted and told that I didn't remember things correctly. Recently I'm remembering some things that he said about his family: his father was once alcoholic and was also adulterous, and his father used to get into fights with his mother and choke her. AH said that he wished his parents had divorced but only if he got to live with his father because his mother was "illogical" and his father was more "reasonable".

Emotional abuse goes hand in hand with manipulation. It can escalate into physical violence (or not), but taking a chance on it is a bit like buying a mystery box of fruit and maybe getting an orange in it, or maybe not.

I feel that it is the responsibility of ALL medical professionals and mental health professionals to educate themselves on addiction and manipulation. The reason is because, in the vast majority of domestic violence cases, there are also cormorbid drug abuse issues. I have been doing some reading. I know this now. I wish I had known this then. The more people know about drug abuse, the better. I know people with young offspring who say that they use drugs recreationally... no, just no. Stop.
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